Our ruling elites have broken our political market

President William Ruto and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga at State House, in Mombasa, on February 24, 2025. [PCS] The political realignments we have witnessed over the last several months are a reminder that the vast majority of Kenyan politicians are really bad at politics. For the sake of argument, let us consider politics to be about organising disparate interests to achieve specific policy objectives while also retaining power. In the context of an electoral democracy, being good at politics also requires being sufficiently popular to command the support of a majority of the electorate. The necessity of mass political mobilisation also implies reliance on reasonably stable coalitions of elite allies that can both bankroll political parties, help govern, and leverage their influence over policy to advance their material interests. As a collective activity, politics is subject to variation in levels of efficiency. The most efficient political actors are those that maximise "output" by balancing the competing (and often contradictory) objectives of politics. They devise and execute policies that advance the general public's material interests. They build strong organisations that coordinate intra-elite political competition for power and influence. And they generally exploit their power to make policy by expanding their material wealth, while also creating jobs for the general public. Kenyan politicians operate far from the frontier on all three dimensions. They are bywords of policy failure in nearly all sectors, with very few of them even bothering to build brands tied to specific policy expertise. They are notoriously bad at building organisations. Coalitions and parties rise and fall not based on serious ideological splits but petty squabbles borne of emotional immaturity, crass tribalism and lack of trust. Finally, even while in power, our politicians generally struggle to leverage policy to advance their own material accumulation in productive sectors. Instead, they invariably default to having to steal to live. In other words, the Kenyan political market is completely broken. The specter of future elections does not focus incumbents' minds on policy design and execution. There is absolutely no shame in perfidious hops from one party or alliance to the next. And stealing appears to improve incumbency advantage. Unfortunately for all of us, we cannot legislate our way out of this problem. When real markets are flooded with counterfeit goods, one does not merely pass ever more stringent laws. Such action must also be accompanied with mechanisms for identifying counterfeits. Which is to say that we should keep channeling the spirit of June 2025 and socially sanction all leaders of dubious quality. -The writer is a professor at Georgetown University

Our ruling elites have broken our political market

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